The Boston Phoenix was founded in 1966 as an arts and entertainment newspaper for the 18-40 year old market. Today, with editions in Rhode Island and Portland, Maine, the Phoenix has a distribution of 220,000 and more than 600,000 readers...

Skiing has a bright future. And not just because the world's most popular winter sport has regained its long-standing edge over its upstart rival, snowboarding. A word of caution, though: break out the Vuarnet sunglasses. Why? Because neon is back.

I'd like to believe that the controversy that follows any Western discussion of China — be it over Tibet, Darfur, or human rights in general — can become part of the international hug that every Olympic gathering aims to be and not the central distraction (violent or otherwise) we remember from Beijing '08.

More by Matt Taibbi

Sluggish performances by Mike Tyson and the Portland Trailblazers seemingly skewed the number of athlete arrests downward in 2005, but the sports-crime industry remained vital thanks to Lawrence Phillips and a little stylistic marketing kitsch.

The debate over net neutrality hasn't gotten much smarter since 2006, when Ted Stevens, of Alaska, opposed the Net Neutrality Act by infamously declaring that the Internet was "a series of tubes" -- but it has intensified along predictable partisan fault lines.

If there's any hope for unlicensed stations to go legit, it's the Local Community Radio Act, passed by Congress in December after a 10-year campaign by proponents of hyper-local radio. However, details of how the legislation will be administrated are still hazy. And some experts say the measure comes too late, and with too little backbone.